After the Future

The Mythos of Redemptive Violence vs. the Christian Chiastic Mythos

Myth provides the framework for any comprehension we have about moral truth--that's the way it was for the ancients, and that's the way it is for us. Mythos operates at a level deeper than what we call "belief systems", because belief systems are too rational, too open to comparison in a market of competing belief systems. Belief systems are profane ideologies even if they are religious, like Christian or Islamic fundamentalism. Myth, like poetry, uses language to represent what is incomprehensible in terms of our ordinary states of consciousness. It establishes some common ground with the familiar, but draws us into unfamiliar depths.

Myth thrives, therefore, only where there is the possibility to experience depth upon depth of sacred meaning, and fundamentalism and rationalism are terrified of depths because they lose control there. Mythos withers in the fluorescent glare of a hypertrophied rationality, and it suffocates in the oxygenless chambers of fundamentalism and dogmatism. For mythos to be mythos it has to deliver a sense of the sacred, a sense of the near presence of the gods, of angels, of the ancestors, of the beloved dead, and that we are all part of a cosmic web of relationships which is there for us to discover if we have any desire to understand what the meaning of our lives is. If we have any desire to understand what it means to live a good life, that is, to have some understanding about why what we do or fail to do matters, why our life adds up to something or fails to.

What we know is dwarfed by what we do not know. And yet whatever part of that ocean we have explored and have gotten to know is connected to the vastness that lies beyond it. And we can deduce some things about what the ocean is like elsewhere based on what we have learned about it locally, but such deductions are provisional at best. How the ocean works near the surface is quite different from how it works in its deepest depths, and what might be true about its laws here could be very different from its laws there. And yet there is a continuum that connects there with here.

Post Secular Thoughts II

I've believed for some time that the religious right is fighting an enemy in secularism that is now a paper tiger. The culture war between the religious right and the secular left has more to do with the past than the future--it was a modern battle, and we are no longer moderns.  It seems to be a fight that people who undertake it enjoy because it makes them feel as though they stand for something, but it's as pointless as standing for monarchy. You can make all the eloquent arguments you want about this position or that, but it's all hot air unless it has some grounding in the spirit of the times.

We are entering an era in which anything goes--we're already in it. It's an era in which there will be no consensus about anything, and people will believe pretty much whatever they want, whatever suits them. The human mind is ingenious and endlessly inventive.  It can come up with the cleverest ways to justify the most absurd ideas.  All any argument needs is a splinter of truth, and with it an elaborate fortress of delusion can be built.

And yet there is something in all of us that, despite our proclivity toward delusion, knows the real thing when we find it.  And we are more likely than not to find the real thing in those elements in our culture that, even if a little tattered and worse for wear, have withstood the test of time. 

That's where we find the ballast that keeps things on an even keel, and one such invaluable source of  ballast is the world's great religious traditions, east and west.  It doesn't matter what the officials of these traditions say or how they try to control things, because they cannot control the uncontrollable. Because the ecclesial management class has abused its power does not mean that the tradition that stands behind it is less worthy of our reverence. Everything we need is available to us or is implied in these traditions; the question only remains whether we have the will to undertake the quest to find there what will do us any good. 

The definition of authority is changing. Too great a proportion of the world's population is now and will continue to be too well informed, to have too easy access to too much information. People will not consent be told what to believe, but they will hearken to those who have found a way to live deeply, authentically from that which has been retrieved from that which sleeps in the tradition. The new authorities will be those who live something that demonstrates that a robust alternative exists which is plausible to the mind, resonant with conscience, and refreshing to the soul. 

There will always be the people who want things in black and white, and while they can cause a lot of trouble, they are not the future. Even if their influence is strong for awhile, it will be short-lived. They are not the ones who are searching out a way forward.  The future lies with others who can no longer be satisfied by the rationalist/materialist straitjacket of the cultural left or the dead, abstract fundamentalism/dogmatism of the cultural right. They will demand something real, something that lives, that's intellectually honest and yet warm and fertile. 

The way forward requires that we look back with a second naivete. This avoids the problems associated with Lot's Wife Syndrome, because it is not motivated by a desire to retreat, to go native in the past. Rather it is motivated, as was our father Abraham, by a longing to move forward into an unknowable future yet trusting in a promise whose fulfillment lies in the far distant future. We must travel lightly, but not without bringing along essential gifts that were bequeathed to us from the ancestors.   

We cannot live as the ancestors lived, but the rationalist prejudices of the moderns caused much that our premodern ancestors valued to be discredited and lost.  Our job now is to retrieve the lost gifts, and to adapt them to our life now lived in circumstances unimaginable to the premoderns. And the place to start is in a reverent recovery of much of that which modernity has rejected in the great religious traditions, all of which have premodern origins. 

We no longer can maintain a "first naivete", which is the state of the believer before critical consciousness. We must search out what has been forgotten or lost with a second naivete, which is the attitude toward  the suprarational that is childlike in its receptivity, but, because we must travel lightly, shrewd in its judgments about what is necessary and what superfluous. 

Secularism and the materialism that is associated with it is on its last legs, but they will continue to have their partisans. Secularism/materialism was for a short time the spirit of the age, and it excited those who were among the age's most influential thinkers from the French philosophes through Marx, Darwin, Freud, and to their followers now on the cultural left. I don't begrudge them their day in the sun; I learned much from them. But their day is done.

Tea Party Profile: Jennifier Stefano

Stefano has big goals for making the Republican Party more assertive. “The lower end of Bucks County [PA] is heavily Democratic,” she said. “We have to go out and start bringing the message to the people, recruiting people to run for vacant seats there. Democratic areas, working- and middle-class places, the conservative message has to be taken there.”

Stefano is emblematic of a striking trend: A significant portion of the Tea Party organizers are women, in a movement that nearly every poll suggested was supported mostly by men. A lot of these women feel called to action and spoke, as Stefano did, as mothers, concerned for their children’s future.

“Barack Obama’s fatal mistake was that he came between me and my child’s future. And the Republicans failed to put up a defense,” she said simply. “I don’t know who likes us less, the Democrats or the establishment Republicans. I don’t care.”

Very interesting profile of an until 2008 relatively unpolitical Mom who got involved in the Tea Party.  She's not crazy. Far from it. But what Progressives need to understand better is why she's so riled up, and why she thinks Obama has come between her and her child's future. 

Progressives are mistaken if they think the Tea Party comprises mostly morons manipulated by the political pros. Stefano is on a mission, but she's no tool of the GOP. People like Stefano are intelligent and shrewd, but they don't have a particularly sophisticated political/economic analysis. Their gut instinct about what's wrong with the country, however, is pretty understandable. Whatever the articulated political objectives might be, the underlying pathos of the Tea Party is defined by a middle-American longing for wholesomeness, and they reject both party establishments for failing to deliver a politics that embodies it. The longing might be somewhat naive, but it is grounded in something most of us should be able to recognize as basic decency, even if we disagree about what 'wholesomeness' means in a pluralistic society.

Post Secular Thoughts

[Ed. Like other posts this week, this is a repost from a piece written several years ago that I've revised somewhat for clarity and to make it fit into the flow of what I'm thinking now. There's clarifying and integrating value for me in lining these posts up one after the other in this way. The idea is to builds, layer by layer, the basic argument I'm trying to make here.  I realize these are waters most people are not swimming in or care to, but I hope some readers find value in it as well. And please do not hesitate to challenge me where I am unclear or just wrong. I have several other posts cued up to follow this one to advance this line of thinking. ]

Modernity is, among other things, the story of the collapse of meaning that is related to the gradual shriveling up of a taken-for-granted sense of the “sacred” as a given in human experience. The word 'sacred' is still in our vocabulary, but we moderns have hardly any sense of the awe and often terror that typified the experience of it for our premodern ancestors. In any event, the common name used to describe this story of the shriveling of meaning is 'secularization', but that word only scratches the surface of the significance of what has happened to us in the last five hundred years.

My goal here is not to lament what we have lost. The social conservatives are naive if they think we can find a way to go back to an earlier form of consciousness just by reintroducing sacred talk into our public practice.  We are moving into a post-secular era, and this movement into the future will require the retrieval of much from the premodern era that was jettisoned during the Modern period. Retrieval and nostalgia are not the same thing. Retrieval use the bricks of the forgotten or rejected past to build something new. Nostalgia wants to set up house in an abandoned ruin.

The conservative program and its strategies that focus on prayer in schools or other religious practices in public places will not solve the problem of the lost sacred. Such strategies derive from a significant underestimation of how deeply secularized we have become. Yes, surely, our public institutions and political discourse have become profoundly secularized, but even more significant has been the degree to which our cognitive/perceptual capacity has become secularized as well. Secularization has affected not just our institutions and public discourse, but also the very way we experience the world. It affects what we see or don’t see in nature, in other people, in the everyday world that surrounds us in our homes and workplaces. Our public, secular language is an honest reflection of our secular experience. Just changing the language won’t change the experience. 

***

It has often been noted that we Moderns in the West have developed what is fundamentally a mechanomorphic imagination of reality. The world has lost its numinous quality, its ability to enchant. We see it now as a big machine—as something interesting and complex and full of unanswered questions about how it works, but we have a very hard time thinking about it in terms other than as something machine-like. And in some quarters of the culture there is serious talk about how the human being is evolving into something evermore machinelike.  We see this reflected particularly in contemporary film. Cyborgs are everywhere.

But we moderns also believe that our mechanomorphic view of the world is an accurate reflection of the way it really is.  Any talk, for instance, that suggests that the earth is our Mother, as has become popular in New Age and ecological circles, seems dotty and overly sentimental. And yet for people in an earlier age, this was their reality. That the earth was a godlike being was as obvious to them as the law of gravity is to us. The gods and goddesses were everywhere inhabiting and animating the streams and forests and mountains, and the modern sensibility finds it impossible to believe this experience of the world was ever anything more than the product of the over-fertile imaginations of a primitive people still living in a dreamworld. For moderns this is the mentality of children who have not yet awakened to the way things really are—the way the enlightened, rational, modern sees them. But maybe the truth is that moderns have fallen asleep to a world that premoderns were awake in.  We are hyper-aware of things and the mechanics of things, but oblivious of the kind of spiritual activity that permeates things and gives them their life.

So to say that meaning has collapsed does not mean that there is no meaning; it is simply to recognize that the public world into which we have been acculturated, liberals and conservatives alike, has been stripped of any possibility of there being robustly experieneced, collectively recognized sacred meanings. All that is left to us are the husks of things, and when we look at these husks we see only their physicality, and so our questions about them become limited to their mechanics and how they work. And so one is left with the world as a machine, and if one asks what this machine is for, the only answer that makes sense is for our economic and entertainment uses. In such a world, what is there to hope for but better bread and better circuses? 

The old religious answers to that question have come to seem incredible because the language in which they were developed was steeped in an experience of the world in which the sacred was a part of everyone’s common experience. If for moderns it doesn’t make sense to talk about the spirits who animate nature, how can it make sense to talk about the sacraments, or transubstantiation, or apparitions, or the communion of saints?  These words are labels for experiences common to the premodern consciousness. To use such language meaningfully assumes a kind of everyday experience of the sacred and of a sense of intimate connection with mostly invisible worlds. In a world that moderns have come to experience everyday as a machine, such language just doesn’t work.  It’s too much at odds with our ordinary understanding of how things are.   

And so as the sense for the sacred as a common experience diminished during the modern era, so did meaning. Surely people find ways to give their lives meaning; but these meanings have no robust, transcendent reference or validation. Meaning as something given from out there has progressively diminished over the last five hundred years.  Meaning has become more and more what we make it. We live in a Potemkin village of "public" meanings, for what lies behind them is simply the void.  Meaning is not "given" out there; meaning is what we project into the world from within. This is now a commonplace with which every Freshman in college is familiar.  It's at the heart of what conservatives object to when they talk about moral relativism.  But conservatives do not offer a way forward; their only answer is to look backward with nostalgia to a time when things were less "relative," when there was tradition into which we were all acculturated that gave us a sense of public, and therefore "objective" meanings.

***

This is why, in my opinion, Nietzsche is the eye of the needle through which any way forward must pass. Nietzsche's was a deeply conservative, Romantic religious sensibility, but he recognized with the full force of his being the implications of this collapse of public meaning and hated what what it was doing to modern men and women.  Nietzsche was nauseated by the modern experience and by the kind of soulless human being it was creating.

A part of him was the nostalgic  classics scholar who wanted things to go back to the way they were in a Golden Age, but he saw with greater clarity than most his contemporaries what had happened in the West--that the world of public, given meaning as it had been defined by the Christian West no longer made sense, and drew out the logical consequences. And so in such a world he saw humans as making one of two  choices that led to false consciousness: either to continue in religious beliefs that simply could not be held by anyone with a shred of intellectual honesty; or to revert to Last-Man, bread-and-and-circus meanings. To read him seriously is to make oneself vulnerable to be stripped of our illusions, and requires that if we are to move forward honestly, we must do so on terms that are chosen in freedom, not given by tradition.

Nietzsche's absurdist metaphysical narrative is an profound articulation of our era's dark night of the soul, a dark night through which we must all pass if we are to mature spiritually. The mother's milk of tradition is no longer proferred. We have to stand on our own. Nietzsche's was such an attempt to walk in freedom--a failed attempt, but a noble one nevertheless. His is not by any means the last word, but it is  a word that must be heard and absorbed if we are to find an honest way forward.

His myth of the eternal return dramatically articulates how profound was his experience of the world a closed system impervious to transcendence and grace.  But he insisted that even in a world that was metaphysically meaningless, the human being nevertheless had to find a way to aspire to be something “more.”  The human being is hardwired for transcendence, whether he likes it or not. But toward what does that transcending transcend?

He understood his philosophical task to find a way to affirm that in a world where nothing is given to him—in a world where all a human being has is his own freedom and will and the inner resources of his soul—to achieve nobility by self-overcoming. If there is no transcendence out there, then transcendence is something that one must find within.  And so “self-transcending” becomes its own goal. There is no heaven or future afterlife reward of any sort. The human being’s dignity and nobility lie in his refusal of such fantasies and in refusing to surrender to any meanings except those of his own making.  Such a human being he called the uebermensch, translated sometimes as the ‘superman’, but more accurately as the ‘overman’.  But really what he meant was the ‘overcoming man’.

I think Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the cultural problem, like Marx's in the economic sphere, was essentially correct; and his solution, like Marx's, while it had a tremendous cultural impact during the twentieth century for some good but mostly ill.  But get the diagnosis right, but the prescription for a cure wrong. Dialectical materialism is a crude ideo-myth, and while the the mythic projection of the uebermensch points to a truth about human nature and human aspiration, it is only part of the story. 

The human being is truly an “overcoming man,” and I would agree with Nietzsche and his disciple Sartre that the deepest dignity of the human being lies in his unconditional freedom, and I would agree that the assertion of this freedom is at the heart of what makes the human being in his thinking and in his willing the remarkable and unique creature that he is.  But the human being is so much more. And the absurdist narrative central to the Nietzschean metaphysics is not the only one in which such an affirmation of radical human freedom is possible. There is also a Christian possibility. It's a possibility that embraces everything true that Marx, Darwin, and Nietzsche have to tell us, but it "overcomes" it, moves beyond it.

The Power of Myth

As anyone who's been reading ATF for awhile knows, I'm a big proponent of the the power of mythic narratives. To live without a narrative is to live without meaning, and even nihilists have narratives. Who was a greater mythmaker with his Eternal Return and Zarathustra stories than nihilist-in-chief, Friedrich Nietzsche. The choice is not between believing in myths or not believing in them, but in recognizing that some myths have quality and others have none. A myth that has quality is not a head trip the way ideology functions in that way, and it does not function to meet the infantile need for security. It is complex and multivalent, and works in soul depths.

So ultimately we don't ever really have a battle of ideas; we have instead a battle of narratives or myths. Mythos does not answer all the questions, but it provides a context within which we search for answers using Logos. And we can only fruitfully argue with one another within the context of a shared Mythos. The contemporary culture war is 'war' because because argument on the level of Logos is an impossibility if there is no shared Mythos.  Even the things both left and right supposedly share, like a reverence for the constitution and Bill of Rights are interpreted in radically different ways because the there is no common ground on the level of Mythos. 

Getting After the Future

[Editor's Note: This is a repost from October 2007 slightly revised. It's a reminder for me about the task I established this blog to think about. I got too sidetracked by the  crisis in the political sphere, and the truth is that now I can no longer bring myself to pay attention to what is going on there at any level of seriousness.  It's just so tediously predictable once you understand the depressingly crude logic by which the Beltway game is played. It's essentially a closed system until something significant and new breaks into it from outside. Obama made things interesting for awhile for leading some of us to believe that he was bringing something new into this closed system, but it's clear now he is not.  He's made it clear that he has no interest in becoming an interesting president if by 'interesting' we mean transformative like Roosevelt and Reagan were.  He may surprise us yet, but it's highly unlikely.

So if anything "interesting" happens, drop me a line, but in the meanwhile I'm going to plow in other fields. American history and culture, i.e., the unfolding of the American soul or the American mind, interests me--and our politics have been and will be a part of that, but not the most important part, and its current facetiously retrograde politics will play out the way they will play out. It's not a matter of short-term unconcern to me--I'm at an age now when the short term is the long term--but the forces shaping our long-term future lie elsewhere.]

***

I've been reading in philosopher of religion Charles Taylor's new book, A Secular Age, which explores the monumental cultural shift over the last 500 years from having the "social imaginary" of premoderns to that of moderns.  By social imaginary he means a culture's collective representation of reality. The medieval peasant in France has more in common with his medieval peasant counterpart in China than than he would with a French worker living today. The greater divide is not between the medieval Frenchman and Chinaman, but between the Frenchman with premodern consciousness and the Frenchman with modern consciousness.

It's not just about the cultural differences. It's about the reality differences because the premodern social imaginary shapes one's consciousness of reality in a profoundly different way from the modern social imaginary.  And we're living in interesting times now, because as the modern imaginary is breaking down, we're in the process of developing yet another social imaginary, which we've been calling postmodern for want of a better name--because it's whatever comes after the modern. Philosophers like Jean Gebser call it the "aperspectival".  But more on that another time. 

The interesting thing for Taylor is not that the world changed because of scientific discoveries, but that the imagination of the world changed during the modern era in such a way that an ordered, meaningful "cosmos" morphed into a vast, empty, disenchanted "universe". In other words, he seeks to describe how and why we have become secularized moderns. And without diminishing all the important advantages that come with our having become moderns, he challenges us to recognize what has been lost and the price we have paid for those advantages. He is not a conservative lamenting our cultural degradation.  He's a philosopher--and a Christian believer-- trying to understand what happened to us and what' its implications are.

Elitism and the American Equality Ideal

People in Red America are in pain, and it's deeper than just economic. I'd argue that a good deal of the pain comes from the disjunction between its mindset and the real world in which Red America lives. The world no longer makes sense for a mindset that was developed in the early 19th century. Rapid change and disruption have been normative in America at least since the 1860s, and the rhetoric we hear from the cultural right is rooted in ante-bellum commonplaces. But as Gordon Wood points out in his book The Radicalism of the American Revolution, even ante-bellum Americans were already highly mobile, individualistic, restless, and commerce driven--there was never a time when Americans were content Hobbits living in their respective Edenic Shires.

In my post from which this quote is excerpted, "What's the Matter with Connecticut?", I responded to an article by Patrick Deneen in which he plays with two well-known books on America's class driven politics--Tom Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas and Christopher Lasch's Revolt of the Elites. Since then I noticed that the topic is also being explored at Sullivan's Dish in this post entitled "Elites and the Tea Party." I want here first to challenge the idea that, except to some degree in the South, there ever was a traditional America in the post-Revolutionary era. If there is anything "traditional" about America it's its restless, uprooted, unruly drive to get ahead.

I'm going to lean heavily on Gordon Wood's argument in the book referenced in the excerpt.  My goal is more to understand the historical roots--or mythos--of the Tea Party mentality in this essay, and then to engage Lasch to evaluate the validity of the Tea Party concerns that have a basis in reality.

Gordon Wood argues that the radicalism of the revolution was social more than political because of its rejection of the traditional hierarchical structure that characterized pre-Revolutionary, monarchical American society. That pre-Revolutionary society persisted in the tidewater South--but less so further west, which was at this time far more egalitarian in its rough-and-ready, frontier ethos. The Carey Grant movie "The Howards of Virginia", although awkwardly cast, is interesting for the way it captures the difference between the settled, conservative, tidewater traditionalists and the striving, restless spirit of the frontier in the Shenandoah Valley. The dynamism of the first years of the Republic lay with the second group, which in every state developed a deep antipathy toward the first.

Jefferson's ideas about liberty and equality and the minimal role for central government in America made a certain kind of sense in the early decades of the new American republic. But as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. points out in The Age of Jackson, the anti-Hamiltonian Virginians--Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe--had become de facto Hamiltonians once faced with the exigencies of office. It was left to John Randolf, John Taylor, and their disciples to carry the anti-statist, anti-Big Money Jeffersonian flame. 

The Jeffersonians had legitimate concerns and well-thought-out arguments. The only problem was that they were out of tune with the American reality as it was rapidly evolving beyond anybody's ability to control it. Even in the South, the original Jeffersonian concerns about the republic being destroyed by the marriage of Big Money and governmental power were pushed aside as a new class of cotton-growing oligarchs emerged who dominated the local governments and obsessed about preserving their slave society. They may have disliked industry-favoring tariffs and Biddle's Bank, but they didn't care at all about equality. 

Nevertheless, I think that we are all Jeffersonians today to the extent that we are dismayed at how the country has become the servant of Big Money. This is certainly a central Tea-Party concern in the high Jeffersonian tradition. The best Jeffersonians understood how money and power tend to aggregate in the hands of fewer and fewer people, and how its doing so destroys and corrupts governments. They were legitimately and presciently concerned about how industrialism was creating a new class of wage slaves. But their response was, to use an anachronism, Tolkienesque. They idealized Shire-like, agriculture-centered small towns, in which there was none of this infernal, greedy, powermad striving. The Jeffersonians hated industrialism, and just wanted it to go away, and if the North wanted to destroy itself, so be it, but leave them out of it. They would do everything they could to protect their verdant Shire from the soul-destroying forces being unleashed in the North.

I understand that motivation for an anti-statist project to preserve local control, but once the industrial revolution was unleashed, such ideas were and still are quixotic--and the Shire in Tolkien's Middle Earth didn't have the ticking time bomb of chattel slavery. I think that it's also questionable how many southerners outside a small group of intellectuals really thought in Tolkien-esque terms, but rather were motivated more by their own economic interests in preserving their oligarchical slave society. But even grant the most noble motivations to the states' rights nullifiers, you cannot stand against a tsunami; the best you can do is ride it. This was the lesson learned in 1865, and then again in 1965, but there are always dead-enders, which are a nuisance, like the Basques in Spain. They become a more serious problem when they get support from Big Money to further the Big-Money agenda. 

Nevertheless, I am sympathetic to the feeling of loss of a more human, face-to-face America that people like Deneen and the crunchy cons at Front Porch Republic lament. And maybe there's some value in their attempt to keep the fantasy of that American past alive, because no matter how much or how little basis it has in the historical reality of the 19th century, our striving for a better future has to be framed by our imagination of what a better future will comprise, and the high Jeffersonian/Tolkienesque, small-is-beautiful imagination does have soulfulness and humanity that should play a part in our thinking our way forward.

The value of what the crunchy cons bring, though, lies not in some obsessive preservation of what does not exist. It lies rather in the inspiration it brings to people who are looking to experiment in living those values now, testing them against reality to see if they can withstand the the ripping forces of the world as it actually exists. I have no problem with the crunchy-con project--there's a lot I like about it; I just find crunchy cons annoying when they blame all the culture's woes on cosmopolitan Liberalism. They have yet to prove that they can live something that models a real possibility in the world as it exists. I love Wendell Berry, but his draft-horse, tobacco-farming monasticism is not a viable model for the rest of us--unless you believe (or hope) the whole globalizing system is going to come crashing down--or should.

***

Anyway, a strong argument can be made that the kind of thing that Deneen and the crunchy cons hate about Liberalism is really at the heart of what made the country interesting and dynamic in those first decades of the American experiment. The static, community-centered, face-to-face society they celebrate was very consciously rejected by the non-elites in that early generation precisely because it preserved the privileged society in which the pre-Revolutionary elites had unfair advantages. The personal, face-to-face society was more characteristic of the monarchical pre-Revolutionary ethos than that of the era after the Revolution when the unruly westerners insisted that democracy replace the oligarchy the eastern elites assumed would continue to shape American society.

For a new democratic equality ideal took shape in the early Republic: the ambitious American aspired not to some elite status--to be the "gentleman" who no longer had to work to support himself and his family, but to be an independent thinker, well-informed, politically involved, clever and resourceful in practical matters, hard working.  And, sure, making money was important, but for a time, at least, wealth did not determine status. The main thing was not to be dependent, that is, to be self-reliant.

But dependency made the old monarchical system work. In the pre-Revolutionary system of dependencies everyone was part of an intricately woven, interdependent hierarchy in which everyone knew his place. In the old system, it was all about a web of face-to-face relationships; in the new system it was all about atomized, independent, individual exchanges. As Gordon Wood points out, this was supported by the introduction of paper money which replaced the old system of personal, face-to-face credit issued by the gentry to people whom they knew and judged trustworthy:

When "exchange" became the primary element of the economy. . . , then paper money became more important. "The rapidity and quick succession of exchanges" required increased quantities of money, and this paper money had democratizing effects. James Madison, like gentry creditors everywhere, may have earlier condemned paper money as destructive of "that confidence between man & man, by which the resources of one may be commanded by another." But now many were extolling that same destruction of confidence between one man and another, for such confidence was simply another name for authority and dependency. In a traditional intimate society it had been possible for a gentleman with a reputation and property to deal with everyone personally. But, said the physician Erick Bollman . . . in 1810, gentlemen could not relate to people in such a personal manner anymore.  When they wished, for example, to buy a turkey from a farmer, they could not say, as they had used to, "I own the big house at the corner of Ninth and Chestnut Street," and expect the farmer to tip his cap an deliver the turkey on credit. Now the farmer will say, "What is that to me!"  Proprietary wealth, conspicuous property, personal reputation, and genteel authority did not matter as they had in the past. What the farmer wanted now was ready money, and it did not matter from whom it came: "I want a dollar" says the farmer, "or else you cannot have my turkey."  Wood, p. 339-40.

Paper money was democratizing because with it one man's dollar was as good as another's. Exchange did not require being part of a local network of face-to-face relationships in which your reputation, good or bad, mattered in the transaction. Was something lost in this destruction of the old intimate economics?  Yes--in fact, it's what southern elites always bragged about retaining in southern society. "We have personal relationships with our poor whites and slaves; we understand one another: We're not coldly impersonal like those money-grubbing Yankees." But the exhilarating American experiment was all about freedom, and what that meant, at least in the North, was freedom from embeddedness in the old vertical system of dependencies. And capitalism was the primary engine for the destruction of that old system of face-to-face relationships that cultural conservatives get so nostalgic about.

This was a significant shift from the English system replicated in America in which everyone knew his place in the hierarchy. I already mentioned "The Howards of Virginia" as an easily accessible portrayal of the old system living uncomfortably with the emerging new. And you can't understand what's going on in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice if you don't have some sense of how the old system worked. D'Arcy's advice to Bingley to dump Elizabeth's sister Jane was just common sense because of the Bennets' lower-gentry status--too big a jump for her, stooping too low for him. And later how shocking was the idea of Elizabeth's becoming the mistress of Pemberly?--an unthinkable jump from lower gentry to the pinnacle of the landed aristocracy. Just not done.

This was the early 19th-century's fantasy novel. It shows what ambitious English men and women aspired to--to climb vertically in the traditional aristocratic class hierarchy.  For Americans the fantasy was entrepreneurial--to become a millionaire, as the Cornelius Vanderbilt story exemplified. Vanderbilt hated the old aristocrats.

Here's Wood on the subject:

In the end, no banks, no government, no institutions could have created the American economic miracle of these years. America suddenly emerged a prosperous, scrambling, enterprising society not because the Constitution was created or because a few leaders formed a national bank, but because ordinary people, hundreds of thousands of them, began working harder to make money and "get ahead." Americans seemed to be a people totally absorbed in the individual pursuit of money. . . .

The American," foreigners said, "is always bargaining; he always has one bargain afoot, another just finished, and two or three he's thinking of.  All that he has, all that he sees, is merchandise in his eyes." English travelers were stunned to see Americans selling their landed estates in order to go into trade--the reverse of what Englishmen sought to do. [The English aspirational fantasy was to be Master or Mistress at Pemberly] (Wood p. 326)

We Americans now think of D'Arcy's first attitude as insufferable snobbery, and perhaps a more affable if patronizing show of manners to his social inferiors would have reflected better on his "character", but his attitude simply reflected how people in the old system were acculturated to think. It was as true in America before the Revolution as it was in England until rather recently. The revolution in the title of Wood's book refers to the broad-based American rejection of all that after the war in a way that surprised and shocked the gentlemen founders who expected the old hierarchical system to remain intact. Wood suggests that America as it actually evolved after the Revolution was, from the perspective of the founders, largely an unintended consequence:

This democratic society was not the society the revolutionary leaders had wanted or expected. No wonder, then, that those of them who lived on into the early decades of the nineteenth century expressed anxiety over what they had wrought. Although they tried to put as good a face as they could on what had happened, they were bewildered, uneasy, and in many cases deeply disillusioned. Indeed, a pervasive pessimism, a fear that their revolutionary experiment in republicanism was not working out as they had expected, runs through the later writings of the founding fathers.  All the major revolutionary leaders died less than happy with the results of the Revolution. (Wood p. 365)

The founders had more in common with Jane Austen's world than with the crude, commerce-driven energies that characterized Cornelius Vanderbilt's. They (the Federalists more than the Jeffersonians) fantasized a future American Republic that would be a lot like the Roman Republic in which the rich, "noble" senatorial class dominated political life. But they unleashed democratic energies that destroyed that fantasy and the social order in which it subsisted. The new Democratic order was largely structured by market relationships, not face-to-face relationships. But . . .

Even Jefferson, sanguine and optimistic as he had always been, was reduced to despair in his last years. . . . He hated the democratic world he saw emerging in America--a world of speculation, banks, paper money, and evangelical Christianity that he thought he had laid to rest. . . .

But Jefferson lived too long, and the future and the coming generation were not what he had expected. Jefferson was frightened by the popularity of Andrew Jackson, regarding him as a man of violent passions and unfit for the presidency. He felt overwhelmed by the new paper-money business culture sweeping through the the country and never appreciated how much his democratic and egalitarian principles had contributed to its rise. Ordinary people, in whom Jefferson had placed so much confidence, more than had his friend Madison, were not becoming more enlightened after all. (Wood p. 367)

Old-system gentlemen like the founders were dismayed at what they saw as an orgy of greed and self-interest. They feared the country would devolve into chaos--without the old system and the old values, what would hold the country together?  Well it became clear in the second decade:

It was not that the past left nothing to cement the society together. The Revolution had not dissolved all the bonds of the old monarchical society; no revolution could.  People still looked after their families and kin; bank directors lent money mainly to themselves and the people they knew; and nearly everyone requested offices for relatives and friends, though now always adding that talent and merit were the prime considerations. Private patronage remained prevalent; only now there was not as much paternalism to clothe it: naked interest seemed to dominate. (Wood pp. 327-28)

What would be the glue that would hold the country together?  Would it be religion?

With individuals being told that each of them was "considered as possessing in himself or herself an original right to believe and speak as their own conscience, between themselves and God, may determine," religion in America became much more personal and voluntary than it ever had been; and people were freer to join and change religious associations whenever they wished. They thus moved from one religious group to another in a continual search for signs, prophets, or millennial promises that would make sense of their disrupted lives. With no church sure of holding its communicants, competition among the sects became fierce. . . . The result was a further fragmenting of Christianity. "All Christendom has been decomposed, broken in pieces: in this "fiery furnace of democracy," said a bewildered Harrison Gray Otis. . . .

Amid this religious fragmentation, Lyman Beecher and others came to realize that making each person alone responsible for his or her salvation left nothing holding "society against depravity with and temptation without" except the force of God's law "written upon the heart" of each individual. Only the self-restraint of individuals--their moral "character"--now remained, it seemed, to hold the burgeoning, unruly society together.  (Wood p. 332-33)

In other words, there were no longer any externally imposed social or legal constraints. It was up to the individual to constrain himself.  But was religion enough to get the job done?  Not likely. Rather the new key would be the discipline of the market:

It was inevitable, therefore, that many came to conclude that this unruly society could tie itself together only by bonds that were in accord with the realities of American freedom and pursuits of happiness. Nothing less than interest itself--that "most powerful impulse of the human breast" --would do as an adhesive force in this dynamic, busy society. . . . They could not be controlled by force, or else they would have no liberty. But appeals to virtue could not contain these busy people either. Only interest could restrain them. Americans govern themselves, they said, because it was in their interest to do so. The desire to make money and get ahead helped them to develop habits of self-control. "The influence of money is wonderful, and the mind changes as the means of acquiring it are presented.  But the 1830s Tocqueville thought he saw what was holding this divers, rootless, restless people together.  "Interest," he concluded. "That is the secret. The private interest that breaks through at each moment, the interest that, moreover, appears openly and even proclaims itself as social theory." . . . (Wood p. 336)

According to French theorist Comte Destutt de Tracy

. . . the United States was "the hope and example of the world." There in the new Republic, he said, commerce had found its full identity with society. Indeed, commerce was society. "Society consists only in a continual succession of Exchanges," and thus "commerce and society are one and the same thing." . . . "Commerce, that is exchange, being in truth society itself, it is the only bond among men; the source of all their moral sentiments; and the first and most powerful cause of the improvement of their mutual sensibility and reciprocal benevolence." And nowhere more than in republican America had commerce been allowed such a full and fair play.

America, at a stroke it seemed, had overturned two millennia of Western history.

Market relationships defined social relationships--the old hierarchical, deferential society had been destroyed, and with it any hope of classical republican virtue shaping the new society. This is striving spirit of interest, to get ahead, is the essence of America and fundamental to understanding the American soul and its equality mythos:

If everyone in the society was involved in money making and exchanging, then to that extent they were all alike, all seeking their own individual interests and happiness, "The market house, like the grave, is a place of perfect equality," said Philip Freneau in bitter derision. But he was right.  All this commercial activity did promote equality, yet not, of course, equality of wealth.  Quite the contrary; wealth was far more unequally distributed in the decades following the Revolution than it had been before. Nonetheless, early-nineteenth-century Americans felt more equal, and for many of them that was what mattered. (Wood p. 340)

But the inequality in wealth was the fly in the ointment that would destroy this early celebration of democratic equality. This celebration could only last so long as it was possible for most Americans to be, or to aspire to be, self-reliant and economically independent. Industrialism and the new wage slave system destroyed that possibility for most Americans. And it was just a matter of time before the captains of these new industries constituted a new class of oligarchs that would dominate political and social life. But in the decades before the Civil War, except in the South, there was no real oligarchy in place--at least no oligarchy that had the kind of control that the new oligarchs would obtain at the end of the century. For a time most white Americans could truly believe that they were, or could be, free and equal citizens.

***

What are the takeaways here? First, that some nostalgic view of a stable, Shire-like, community-centered United States is largely a fiction. Early America, even in the urban East, was very like what we think of now as the rough-and-tumble wild west. The Revolution unleashed powerful, commerce-driven energies which largely destroyed the old social order and its traditional pieties and authorities. What we have come to think of as "traditional values" were largely invented in the early 19th century, and are a bizarre amalgam of free-market capitalism with evangelical Christianity, neither of which had much to do with the vision of the founders, who despaired as it became clear that economic "interest" and not gentlemanly republican virtue would largely shape the future of the country. 

The American ideal held that citizens would be self-reliant and economically independent, free from the dependencies of the intensely hierarchical societies of the precolonial era that continued to dominate society in England. Foreign visitors to the United States were often shocked at how ordinary working Americans did not know their place, and that was because these Americans did not think that people richer than they were any better than they. The early days of the Republic were largely about the widespread rejection of the old-world status system determined by hereditary wealth.

The American ethos was one in which everyone was expected to "get ahead" and the opportunities abounded for anyone with a lick of sense and an ounce of ambition to do it. Getting ahead meant going into business for oneself as a merchant, tradesman, artisan, or farmer.  Independence and equality were primarily rooted in that ability to make your own life without the benefits of inherited wealth, family connections, and the patronage system that determined status and the chances for success in the old system. Externally imposed social order or restraints were minimal. Social order largely derived from the discipline of the market and by an individualistic, conscience-centered, evangelical Christianity.

Sound familiar? This imagination of America is at the heart of the Tea Party movement. It doesn't have much to do with the founders' republican vision, and it doesn't have much to do with reality as it exists in America today, but these ideas define deep themes in the American soul, and in confusing times we revert to them for want of a better way to think about who we are and where we are going.

The country's center of gravity for a while did not lie with the very wealthy, but with the prospering, self-reliant, property-owning middle. That was the ideal, and for a while it seemed as though it had some relationship to reality, but the emergence of the cotton oligarchs in the South and the industrial oligarch's in the North changed all that, and by 1900 the ideal no longer bore any relationship to the reality of American society. The fears of the Jeffersonians had become realized, and Whiggish, idealist elites and populists joined forces in a new Progressive movement to redress the balance in what eventually emerged as the New Deal compromise that accepted that Bigness was our future, and that Big Business required Big Government to keep it in check if there was any hope of preserving either political or economic equality in this country.

The second takeaway: This early 19th-century mentality forms the foundation for the commonplaces of the Tea Party movement and are an essential part of the American mythos.  It's this aspect of the Tea Party movement that must be appreciated and respected by serious people on the Left. It's a mythos that is inadequate to deal with the complexity of our life now, but it has elements that we all should be able to work with to build something new. For me it's a question of who will own that mythos--the forces of regression or the forces that will move us forward.

None of us can stand against the tsunami force of historical change, but that does not mean we are simply to be swept away by it.  We must learn to ride the wave and to use its energies, and to become skilled in that we have to be resourceful and adaptive, and to me that means we need to rely less on what is outside and more on our own interior resources. The architecture of society does not matter so much as the architecture of our souls. And the architecture of our souls does not depend on society's promoting virtue so much as conservatives want us to think. We have one another, we have access to the great souls of the past, we have grace. That's plenty to work with, and working with all three has been what the American experiment at its best has been about from the beginning.

John David Ebert on Myth at the End of History

This is the most interesting thing you'll hear this week:

This is the second segment of af a longer interview. The other segments of the interview can be found at this YouTube link.

See also related ATF posts here, here, and here.

Quote of the Day: John Taylor of Caroline

"Wealth, like suffrage, must be considerably distributed to sustain a democratick republic; and hence, whatever draws a considerable proportion of either into a few hands, will destroy it. As power follows wealth, the majority must have wealth or lose power." . . .

Taylor named two threats to the natural economic order, "two modes of invading private property; the first, by which the poor plunder the rich, . . . sudden and violent; the second, by which the rich plunder the poor, slow and legal."  The first he dismissed as irrelevant to the American circumstance.  Here the poor could not become dangerous until the concentration of wealth greatly increased their number. The real peril, he believed, lay in the second mode: plunder from above, orderly and legalized.  The succession privilege orders through history--the priesthood, the nobility, now the banking system--showed how every age had known its own form of institutionalized robbery by a minority operating through the state.  Quotes from Taylor's An Inquiry into the Policy and Government of the United States, 1814, in  Schlesinger, The Age of Jackson, pp. 22-23

Taylor was a hardcore, principled Jeffersonian dismayed about how the Hamiltonians were winning in the period after the War of 1812--even Jefferson and Madison had caved to the Federalist program. Capitalism was simply a force that could not be resisted.  More coming on this theme.  I'm interested in understanding better and with as much sympathy as a I can muster, the intellectual, emotional, and mythic roots of the Tea Party, which in large part lie in the thinking of people like Taylor.

Quote of the Day: Frank Rich

We can’t afford to forget now that the single biggest legacy of the Iraq war at home was to codify the illusion that Americans can have it all at no cost. We willed ourselves to believe Paul Wolfowitz when he made the absurd prediction that Iraq’s oil wealth would foot America’s post-invasion bills. We were delighted to accept tax cuts, borrow other countries’ money, and run up the federal deficit long after the lure of a self-financing war was unmasked as a hoax. The cultural synergy between the heedless irresponsibility we practiced in Iraq and our economic collapse at home could not be more naked. The housing bubble, inflated by no-money-down mortgage holders on Main Street and high-risk gamblers on Wall Street, was fueled by the same greedy disregard for the laws of fiscal gravity that governed the fight-now-pay-later war. (Source)

Deficits don't matter for Republicans except when Democratss are in power.  They don't matter if funds are being spent to benefit cronies in defense or oil.  They only matter when the "little people' are benefiting, even if only marginally. Moral hazard is only for the peonage.

Quote of the Day: Glenn Greenwald

This last point is the critical one for me, and most illustrative of why I find the effort to cut Social Security so appalling.  For the moment, leave to the side abstract debates over the propriety of social programs, or even debates over specific proposals such as raising the retirement age or means-testing.  Instead, let's look at what is happening more broadly:

One of the most significant developments in the U.S. is the rapidly and severely increasing rich-poor gap.  A middle class standard of living is being suffocated and even slowly eliminated, as budget cuts cause an elimination of services that are hallmarks of first-world living.  Because the wealthiest Americans continue to consolidate both their monopoly on wealth and, more important, their control of Congress and the government generally, we respond to all of this by enacting even more policies which exacerbate that gap and favor even more the wealthiest factions while taking more from the poorest and most powerless.  And now, the very people responsible for the vulnerable financial state of the U.S. want to address that problem by targeting one of the very few guarantors in American life of a humane standard of living:  Social Security.

Advocates of cutting Social Security -- like Jonathan Chait and the Post's Fred Hiatt -- are the same people who cheered on the attack on Iraq and other policies of endless American War, which has drained America's budget and turned it into a debtor nation.  Millions of other human beings -- but not, of course, them -- suffered and sacrificed for those policies.  And now that it's time to address the economic carnage caused by all of this, to what do they turn for savings?  The handful of social programs which provide at least some small guarantee of a minimally decent standard of living in old age.  (Source)

Lessig on Neoprogressives

But if this Neo-Progressive Movement is to have any chance of success, it needs to be disciplined enough not to insist that all members also be members of Moveon.org. We need, to borrow and remix the insight of Cass Sunstein, an "incompletely theorized movement." We need Republicans who stand in the tradition of Reagan and Goldwater, yet who are as disgusted with the sellout that corporate money has induced as are we. . . .

The Neo-Progressive Movement must also make its case to the Tea Party, the most potent political movement in America today, far deeper than it is caricatured to be by both Fox and MSNBC. For whatever extreme social vision motivates some in that party, the belief that government has been bought motivates them all. (Source)

Agreed, but not going to happen any time soon.  No such coalition of liberals and conservatives can be effected so long as cultural values issues divide and conquer Americans who otherwise have common ground on these issues of money and power aggregation. Abortion and gay rights, for instance, ignite powerful emotions, and feelings about those issues trump, for now at least, whatever importance people give on a head level to how money controls the political agenda. Nothing changes until the emotions connected with issues related to power and money aggregation become more intense than the emotions connected with cultural-values issues.

This inability to become impassioned enough about power and money aggregation is a bigger problem for liberals than conservatives.  The conservatives are all riled up and out on the streets about bailouts and corporate giveaways. The Liberals aren't out there in anything near the same force nor will they look to join forces with the Tea Party because they only see the differences on the cultural values issues and not the common ground on the power and money issues. As long as this remains the case Neoliberalism will remain a nice idea but not a potent political force.

See also "The Tea Party and the Middle."

Spiritual Zombies

So, who or what is the “true object” of the anger welling up from the American body politic in the late summer of 2010? What “untouchable” figure or force is responsible for our dire predicament?  My answer would be similar to that offered by G.K. Chesterton when the Times of London sponsored an essay contest on the question, “What is wrong with the world?” Chesterton’s brief, two-word essay read simply, “I am.”

We are.

The United States is now a zombie nation not because of something that Muslims, Mexicans, African-Americans, or the poor have done, but because it is filled with 310 million zombies, spiritual corpses who give the appearance of life, but are filled with “dead men’s bones and every kind of impurity.”

This is the most disconcerting answer of them all, and the real reason why the “true object of [our] anger is untouchable.” In our pride and sinfulness we spurn the truth about ourselves and our country. As a result, the one thing we refuse to do at all costs is examine ourselves, each of us, and question our contributions to the disintegration we see around us. That was true in the bellum omnium contra omnes – the war of all against all - in primitive societies, and it is true today. And yet we – all of us – are the source of our present discontent and the collapse that may be upon us. . . .

No, the solution to our problems can be found in one word: conversion.

 Mark Gordon (h/t Mike McG)

A different, more expanded understanding of spiritual zombie-ism as I have talked about it here, but apt. Our zombie-ness is indeed our normal condition, and it's precisely from it that we all need to be saved.